by Sam Pivnik
I used to love to watch the trains snorting and wheezing as they pulled in and out of the new, flat-roofed Art Deco station. The place now looked like nothing on earth. There were no civilians, nobody going about their daily business. Just more SS men and police and dogs, all the paraphernalia of the Nazi state. There was no sense to any of this. No one told us where we were going, just yelling ‘Lausbub!’ ‘Scheissjude!’ and ‘Arschlöcher’ at us. Scheissjude. Shit Jew. Centuries of pointless hatred wound up in one snarled, unimaginative insult. If anyone faltered or dragged their feet, the batons of the police came down, cracking heads or shoulders.
There were no trains. So we stood on the platform in silence. Anyone who spoke was dragged out of position and hit. Terrified mothers kept their babies close to them, whispering in their unknowing ears, holding them close to their breasts, the only security they could offer.
Those forty or so minutes on the platform crawled by like years. Then we heard the shrill whistle and saw the smoke of a locomotive in the distance, a black engine with five carriages. On the roof sat SS men, armed to the teeth. They wore their stahlhelmes with their distinctive low brim and with motorcycle goggles attached to them. I couldn’t understand how they could hold on while the train was moving, but perhaps they had some sort of harness up there.
If there was going to be trouble it would be now. There were not many men in our group. My father was in his early fifties – I saw that then as being ancient – and I was sixteen. What could we do? Rush the lines of the SS? Jump the tracks and run for it? Everybody had a family – wives, mothers, kids. Still, in the chaos of boarding something might have been tried. In the event, nothing was. Like sheep we waited while the SS checked that the cars were empty and then we moved forward to the yelled orders ‘Einsteigen!’ Get in! Get in! It didn’t take long. We didn’t have much in the way of personal possessions when we went into the Kamionka; we had even less now. Some people had a single suitcase or a bundle tied with string. These were thrown in along with the people. If there was a delay, it was caused by the old struggling to climb the steps or the little ones unable to make it by themselves. We were pushed into the carriages, some people crushing their backsides on the hard-slatted wooden seats, others jammed against walls and windows standing up. Kicks, thumps from the batons – this was our farewell to Bedzin. We didn’t know it then, but most of us were leaving our birthplace for the last time. Within days, the SS could claim with smugness and satisfaction that yet another Polish town was Judenrein, cleansed of Jews. Another job well done.
They locked the doors and the train moved off, rattling and clanking its way out of Bedzin station. I remember my mother checking, as she probably had a hundred times that morning, that we were all together. And I remember too what happened next. A rabbi in the carriage with us took out his prayer book; so did my father and the other Orthodox men and they began chanting the psalms of King David.
I was never a particularly religious man. Certainly as a callow sixteen year old, whose Bar Mitzvah had been held in secret in a kitchen, I couldn’t share my father’s convictions. I prayed every day with my father because that was expected of me. I looked at the men praying, their faces grey and frightened under their hats. But their eyes were bright with optimism as they took comfort from the words they were reciting. They knew that God would help us. Hadn’t that been His promise all along? He would find a way, give us a sign.
But He didn’t.
We passed the same factories and mines, in this industrialised part of Poland, that we’d all passed so often before. The silver birches shone like burnished metal in the noon sun, dappled by their whispering leaves, the whistle and rattle of the train the modern, machine-driven sound which was the backdrop to the deep, sad, echoing psalms in the carriages.
I suppose we’d been travelling about an hour when we felt the train slow and jolt into a siding. Crouching a little and peering out between the crammed shoulders of people around me, I could see rows of upright concrete posts, curving inwards at the top and rows of barbed wire strung between them. Beyond that were more rows, this time of low, single-storey huts. This was a camp, probably, we all told ourselves, one of the labour camps they’d been sending Bedziners to for months. There was a screech of brakes and the carriage doors were thrown open. ‘Raus! Raus!’ I hadn’t appreciated how guttural and heartless the German language sounded until I heard it on that platform. We scrabbled together our few belongings and stumbled down onto the concrete, blinking in the sunlight.
There was a wall of noise – a voice snarling orders over a loudspeaker system, guards in the uniform of the Waffen-SS pushing and prodding with their guns, big dogs on chain leashes growling and barking, their teeth bared, their hair standing on end. It was difficult to tell who was more rabid – the dogs or their handlers. But it was the other men who fascinated me. I’d seen the SS and their outfits before, but these people wore prison clothing, with vertical stripes of blue and dirty white that looked like pyjamas, and they were yelling at us too. They told us to leave our luggage, to put it there on the Rampe. We’d get it later, they said, and they told us to line up.
We were all numb with shock. What kind of camp was this? My father stood with his mouth open, frowning, trying to make some sort of sense of what was happening. Hendla clung to his right hand, Chana to his left. The boys clustered around my mother, as they had for the whole journey here. Only I was standing alone.
To one side of me, one of our old neighbours from the Kamionka was trying to get some answers, to inject some sanity into this chaos. He was talking to one of the men in striped trousers who had a scruffy black jacket over his tunic and a shapeless workman’s cap on his head. From nowhere, he brought a thick wooden club down on the questioner’s head, shouting at him to shut up and do as he was told. And then, as if to emphasise that might is right, he gave him a thump with the stick, calling him, between blows, a filthy fucking Jew. The man from the Kamionka wasn’t asking questions any more. He was lying on the platform, bleeding and gasping in shock.
I felt my shoulder jolted and another man in stripes yelled over my head to leave the luggage and get in line. Then as he looked down and saw me he whispered something I didn’t understand – ‘Tell them you’re eighteen…’ – and he was gone through the crowd, shouting his orders again.
What kind of place was this where men were clubbed senseless for asking polite questions? Where madmen in pyjamas told you in secret to lie about your age?
Lines were forming, after a fashion. In Bedzin we’d been forming lines for three years, queuing for bread; but this was different. We weren’t soldiers; we knew nothing about drill. And the SS were obsessed with things like this. Regimentation. Instant obedience. Mindless subservience. The heel-clicking militarism of the old Prussia given a sinister, appalling purpose by a savage adherence to the sick mentality of the Third Reich. We huddled together about ten metres from the train, still snorting and belching smoke in the siding. Anybody still stumbling about, shocked, dazed, unable to move quickly enough, was being hit with sticks and rifle butts or bitten by the snarling dogs, their ivory teeth sinking through cloth and flesh.
An SS man was walking the platform, keeping up a shouted commentary to get families together in one place. Others were stopping at various points along the line, singling out individuals, asking how old they were, how many children they had, and they were winkled out of line.
Eventually two groups had formed, still in columns but something had happened. I didn’t know it then but I had witnessed my second selection, the casual decision as to who should live and who should die in accordance with whatever insanity was currently coming out of Berlin. The first selection had been in the stadium back in Bedzin but there was something altogether more sinister – more final – about this one. My column was full of families, the old with their haunted, grey faces; the children with their tear-stained cheeks; parents with panic written all over them, trembling in the summer sun. The other column was all me
n, from their teens to their fifties, some of them glaring anxiously across to where we stood.
Along the platform a knot of SS men stood together, chatting, almost unaware of the rough-handling that had just happened. Beyond them, their engines running and the exhaust fumes rippling the ground, stood grey-painted trucks and a military ambulance. There were more snarled orders. The column of men moved off, past the knot of SS. I heard my mother’s voice whispering Yiddish in my ear, ‘Szlamek, save yourself,’ and she gave me a hard shove in the direction of the men’s line. I hadn’t always obeyed my mother, the woman who had given me life and had held us together for the last three years. I stared at her, not knowing what to say. What could I have said? ‘See you later?’ ‘See you tomorrow?’ ‘I’ll be back in time for supper.’ ‘Back for Shabbat.’ I looked at her, at all my family, for the last time. Father, whose world had fallen apart so long ago, whose God had forgotten him; mother, my anchor who would have forgiven me anything; Hendla, who had dreamed of Palestine; Majer, Chana, Wolf, Josek. My family. My blood. Dumbly, unable to grasp exactly what was happening, I joined the marching line.
We were walking past the knot of SS and I particularly noticed the officer who was with them. I am a tailor’s son and I know a beautiful, hand-stitched uniform when I see one. He was dapper, good-looking, with dark hair, and when he smiled there was a gap between his front teeth. His boots were like mirrors in the summer sun and in his right hand he carried a pair of grey doeskin gloves. I remember this especially because he was looking each one of us up and down, flicking the gloves to left or right. I never saw him speak, but the flick was a command in itself. SS men alongside him hauled men out of line; left, left; right; left.
Those to the left were being sent back, marshalled in a tight U-turn along the platform to join the women, children, the families and the old. I’m not the tallest man in the world. When I was sixteen I suppose I stood about five foot three and probably looked strong. I’d been hiding in a stinking ghetto attic for four days, a stranger to soap or a comb, and I hadn’t eaten or drunk very much, but I was wearing my factory overalls and stout boots. I remembered the striped lunatic on the platform, ‘Tell them you’re eighteen.’ It began to make a kind of sense. I hoped the officer would flick his gloves to the left – that I’d be sent back to my family again and be able to hug them all. But he flicked to the right. He didn’t ask my age or what work experience I had or where I was from. And I still didn’t know that this was another selection and the officer didn’t speak to me because he was Aryan, a member of the Master Race and I was a Jew, Untermenschen, sub-human. Nothing else mattered.
We were shunted to one side, to stand and watch as the family column went through the same procedure. I tried to see my family, but I was at the back of our column and I couldn’t. As they passed the SS officer, the gloves flicked again left and right and a few people were separated out. Some of them were young women, and I wondered if Hendla was among them, wrenched from her family as I had been minutes before. But I couldn’t see her. One or two men were singled out too and I couldn’t understand why. They joined the bulk of the procession making its way towards the waiting trucks.
We saw the striped prisoners helping them at the tailboards, passing babies and toddlers up to mothers and fathers, supporting the old and crippled. Still I couldn’t see the Pivniks, though I believed I’d see them all later. The trucks cranked into action and snaked away in the afternoon, the ambulance bringing up the rear of the convoy.
After the initial panic and chaos of the arrival at the platform, a sense of calm had descended. Hell became Purgatory. The murmurs of the families had died away with the drone of the trucks’ engines, but now, Hell came back. More orders. ‘Schnell! Schnell!’ and we were being herded along in the wake of the trucks, our shuffling turning into a march and the march into a run as the SS and the striped men took up the pace. Anyone who couldn’t keep up was pummelled to the ground or kicked where he lay.
We stood, panting and wheezing on that still hot August day outside a bleak-looking barracks. Through the main door was a huge bare room which was used as a warehouse. We were told to strip and leave our clothes in neat piles. The striped men gave us bits of string to tie our boots or shoes together. Anyone who didn’t move fast enough, anyone fumbling with his buttons, would feel a club across his shoulders or round his head as the striped men walked among us, barking their orders in German. It was obvious to me at once that these were not SS but trusties of some sort, chosen men who, while not Aryan or even Volksdeutsche themselves, would nevertheless comply with SS regulations. And many of them seemed to be enjoying themselves, seeing us humiliated and afraid.
They shouted at us to give up our gold and dollars and called us ‘fucking Yids’. They knew we had them, they said, and we were to hand them over. It was all ancient nonsense, whipped up by the Nazi propaganda machine. Jews are obsessed with money. Jews are rich – they hoard gold. The trusties were shaking out trouser pockets, jackets, forcing open clenched fists looking for anything they could find. They pocketed coins and notes, tucked away cigarettes and rings. Prayer books were tossed onto the floor.
Once we were all stark naked, shivering for all the heat of the day, they gave us scraps of hard white soap and took us through into the next room. This one was as big and empty as the one we’d just left but it smelt damp and the floor was wet and slippery. Shower heads jutted from iron pipes overhead and we heard a trusty shout, ‘Make sure you have a thorough wash.’ The door slammed shut and we heard it lock. We’d all heard stories about showers in the camps and about what the SS made their soap from and for one long, ghastly moment, I started to believe it. Then the showers started – ice cold water that took my breath away and then turned warmer. After those stinking, sweltering days in the liquidation of the ghetto, it was a little bit of Heaven in this Hell.
No sooner had the water started to warm up, it was switched off with a loud clanking through the pipes. A door at the far side of the room was hauled open and we were moved on again, still naked and soaking wet. Here the trusties carried mechanical clippers of the type I’d seen used to shear sheep in the Garden of Eden and they started work on us. I can hear the whine of those contraptions to this day and I remember the pain of the process. They sat us down on hard wooden chairs and ran the clippers in swift swathes over our heads, like mowing a lawn. The agitating teeth ripped out hair and left cuts, deep and painful.
I don’t think I had any chest hair so I was spared that, but the clippers ripped under my arms and around my balls. Anyone who screamed or cried out could expect a sharp tap with a club. I looked around at the others once the procedure was over. They had taken away our identities. Bald as babies, with cuts and scrapes all over us, we now all looked the same – Szlamek Pivnik, the schoolboy who had become a furniture maker was now an anonymous member of the Untermenschen. No clothes, no personal possessions, no hair and no hope.
Again a door opened. If I wasn’t so terrified and demoralised I’d have been impressed by the cold efficiency of the place. Dehumanisation in less than two hours. In the next room were trestle tables with a trusty sitting behind each one. But before we reached them, we had a final indignity to undergo. A trusty grabbed my chin, forcing open my jaw and he peered inside my mouth. This wasn’t amateur dentistry. The man was looking for valuables. Then I was jolted forwards and my feet kicked apart. I’ve never felt pain like it, doubled over as the trusty shoved some sort of prod up my arse. Nothing valuable there either. Shocked and bleeding I stood in line until it was my turn to go forward to the trestle table.
I’d been here before, witnessing the SS obsession with paperwork. I’d seen it at the Hakoah football stadium on the day the skies darkened so I knew what to expect. The trusty asked me my name. I told him it was Szlamek Pivnik. He asked me my date of birth. For a second I remembered it again, the whispered line of the trusty on the Rampe, ‘Tell them you’re eighteen.’ In the end I told him the truth ‘1 September 1926.’ He ask
ed my place of birth and I told him, Bedzin.
I was still answering these questions when I felt a sharp pain in my left forearm. A trusty had written a number on my still damp skin in ink and started to scratch over it with a large needle mounted on a block of wood. Instinctively I pulled away, but he grabbed my wrist, slammed my arm down on the table and told me to stop fucking around. He growled in a German accent I hadn’t heard before that he was tattooing my number. Tattooing is anathema to the Jews. I wondered briefly whether my father was undergoing this terrible indignity in another room. I kept still. Better to bear this pain than worse that would follow if I made a fuss.
The trusty looked me in the face, reading there all the pain and the fear and the loss. He asked me who I had come with; was it my parents? The accent was still strange, but the voice soft. It was the only soft voice, other than my mother’s, that I’d heard all day. I opened my mouth to speak but could make no sound.
He nodded, telling me I mustn’t worry about it now. He finished his tattooing, and said, ‘They’re probably already in Heaven.’
Then they’d finished with me and I stumbled out through yet another doorway, numb with the shock of what I’d just heard. I looked down at the numbers on my arm, glittering with blood. It read 135913. I was an animal, stamped with an indelible number like sheep on their way to the slaughter. If I’d been able to read what the trusty had written on his lined foolscap sheet I might have been less impressed with Nazi efficiency. He’d got my personal details right, and the date – 6 August 1943 – but there was no mention of Bedzin. The official record reads: ‘From the Sosnowiec ghetto.’ In the scheme of things, you couldn’t exactly call it the final indignity.
